Thursday, February 22, 2007

Back when I had a roommate, I watched more football than I do these days. I find the sport rather mundane relative to baseball, except for the really chaotic moments -- trick plays, blocked punts, laterals, fumble returns, Steve Atwater-driven collisions, Urban Meyer-designed offenses and so on. The running joke we had was that nothing was more exciting than a safety, and as such, we were going to start a website, Safeties.com, devoted to tracking this rare bird. Alas, the domain was already registered, and our dreams of filthy Internet lucre died a hard death.

Not that the example I'm setting here shouldn't have tempered our enthusiasm.

To take our nascent empire cross-platform, we were similarly going to carve out a chunk of turf for DefensiveIndifference.com. "Because, damn it, somebody cares!" would be our motto. I guess apathy took hold there, too, because nothing ever happened. Until now.

Because damn it, somebody cares: my BP colleague Dan Fox notes a change pertaining to the crediting of Defensive Indifference among the latest batch of rule changes. Dan reports that DI is apparently enjoying a renaissance, with about five percent of all stolen base attempts being scored as such. The rules changes might even up that rate, given that they allow official scorers more latitude to award these little jewels.

Such information completes me, and since it's clear that Defensive Indifference is finally the hip topic among baseball cognoscenti, I've decided to start caring. Vive l'indifference!